Master Python Lists Basics to Create a Jumbled Game

What will we cover?

In this tutorial we will learn Python Lists basics. This will enable us to create a Jumbled Game.

Step 1: Python Lists and Indexing

A Python list is like a list you know it. And the beauty of Python lists is that they can contain anything.

But let’s get started immediately. You can define a list as follows. This list contains strings, but it could contain any types or objects.

my_list = ['Apple', 'Orange', 'Banana']

You get the length of a list by using len().

len(my_list)

Which will return 3.

A list is indexed from 0 – that is you get the first element as follows.

my_list[0]

The second element.

my_list[1]

And it continues as you can guess.

You can index from the end of a list by negative indexing – the last element is indexed by -1.

my_list[-1]

Then the second last element with.

my_list[-2]

Step 2: Get a random element from a list.

Remember the random library we used?

Well, it can be applied on a list.

import random

my_list = ['Apple', 'Orange', 'Banana']
random_item = random.choice(my_list)
print(random_item)

This will pick a random item from the list.

Step 3: Pick random samples from a sequence like a string

Imagine you want to get random samples from a sequence?

What is a sequence, well it can be a string. A string in Python is a sequence.

Then you can pick random samples from it.

letter_sequence = 'abcdefgh'
samples = random.sample(letter_sequence, len(letter_sequence))

Then samples will be a list of unique elements from letter_sequence. Hence, it is all the letters uniquely represented.

Step 4: The Jumbled Game Explained

The jumbled game can be described as follows.

• A word jumble is a word puzzle game that presents the player with a bunch of mixed up letters and requires them to unscramble the letters to find the hidden word.
• The computer will take word and jumble it (mix up the letters).
• Then the player will guess what the word is
• An initial word list could be: [‘father’, ‘enterprise’, ‘science’, ‘programming’, ‘resistance’, ‘fiction’, ‘condition’, ‘reverse’, ‘computer’, ‘python’]

Step 5: Implement the Jumbled Game

This is straight forward with our competencies.

import random

words = ['father', 'enterprise', 'science', 'programming', 'resistance', 'fiction', 'condition', 'reverse', 'computer', 'python']
word = random.choice(words) 

jumble = random.sample(word, len(word))
jumble = ''.join(jumble)

print(f"The jumble word is: {jumble}")
guess = input(f"Write your guess: ")

if guess.lower() == word:
    print(f"Corret! The {jumble} is {guess}")
else:
    print(f"Incorrect! The {jumble} is {word}")

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